New on my blog: “Engagement Is the Enemy of Serendipity”—a seemingly minor change to the New York Times iPad app provides a good case study in what’s wrong with the algorithmic personalization of our media, and why we need to bump into the unexpected.
@ayjay This is an excellent and important question. The kinds of serendipity I mention in that piece are very analog: the print newspaper, the record store, the bookstore, etc. I'm also heavily dependent on RSS, but the 400 feeds I follow are largely from digital humanities and the early years of blogging, and I haven't found or added much recently (and many of those feeds are moribund, alas). So what would digital serendipity look like? There's some hope in generous interfaces, perhaps, like the ones that Mitchell Whitelaw designs for cultural heritage collections. BTW, I assume you heard that Radiolab where Latif Nasser explains how he finds interesting stories for the show using the Wikipedia Random Article button?